Myojuji Temple Inner Gate

A Late-Edo Gate Guarded by Carved Beasts

Myojuji Chumon (妙壽寺中門, also written Myōju-ji Chūmon) is the middle gate of a Jodo Shinshu temple in Kanaya-machi, Bungotakada City, Oita Prefecture, built in the closing decades of the Edo period and added to Japan's national Register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 27 March 2018.

The gate stands east of the main hall, on the axis between the hall and the street. It measures 4.5 metres across the opening, with low wing walls called sodebei running out to left and right, and carries an irimoya hip-and-gable roof laid with hongawara, the paired flat-and-round tiles used on formal buildings. Its type is shikyakumon, a four-legged gate: two round main pillars carry the ridge, and four square subsidiary posts brace them front and back.

Those posts are tied together by a koryo-gata kashiranuki, a head tie-beam shaped with the gentle upward curve of a rainbow beam. Above it sit degumi bracket sets. The frog-leg strut between them, the kaerumata, is carved with a chrysanthemum. Behind the brackets, the curved boarding known as shirin carries an all-over incised pattern called jimon-bori, a decorative treatment that fills a surface most gates leave plain.

The beam ends are where the carver enjoyed himself. Projecting from the main pillars is a baku, a mythical creature with a trunk-like snout that is said in Japan to eat bad dreams. The wing posts carry a shishi, the lion-dog familiar from shrine approaches, and a kirin, the Chinese qilin, a hooved chimera whose appearance was thought to announce the arrival of a wise ruler. Three different animals on one small gate is a deliberate display.

Step underneath and look up. The ceiling is kagami-tenjo, a mirror ceiling: a single flat expanse of boards with no coffer grid to break it. After the density of the carving outside, the effect is a held breath.

Dating, Repair, and What Registration Means

The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the gate as late Edo, giving a range of 1830 to 1868, with repairs carried out in the early Showa era. Bungotakada City specifies that the Showa-era work was to the door leaves. The dating itself rests on the carving: no inscription has been found on this gate, so specialists read the style of the beast heads and the strut against dated examples elsewhere. That method places it firmly in the final generation of Edo temple carpentry, when carving programmes on gates reached their most elaborate.

Registration is not the same thing as designation, and the distinction is worth holding onto. National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties are designated, which subjects the owner to a permit system covering almost any change. Registered Tangible Cultural Properties are registered, a system begun in 1996 to cast a wider net over buildings roughly fifty years old and upward. It runs on notification rather than permit, leaving owners freer to repair and keep using their buildings. Myojuji Chumon entered the register in the eighty-ninth round under registration number 44-228, listed under criterion two: a work that sets a standard for design.

The official assessment calls the gate large in scale and rich in design, and scale is a real part of the argument. A 4.5-metre four-legged gate is substantial for a provincial parish, and the temple's outer gate, the sanmon, is narrower at 3.5 metres. The middle gate was the one the temple chose to spend on.

Walking the Approach

The gates at Myojuji are best understood in sequence rather than one at a time. Coming from the city road on the northeast, the first structure is the sanmon, the outer gate facing the street: mid-Edo, 3.5 metres wide, plainer, and by the city's account holding to older forms. Then comes the chumon, larger, later, and covered in carving. Only after both does the main hall appear, and the main hall dates to around 1902.

Walk that line and the chronology runs backwards from what a visitor might expect. The building at the end of the approach is the youngest thing on the axis, and the gates you pass through to reach it are older than the hall by a century or more. This is how most Japanese temple precincts actually accumulate. Halls burn, decay, and get rebuilt at ever greater expense; gates and bell towers, cheaper to maintain and less exposed, quietly outlast them.

Two other registered buildings sit off to the south side: the sutra repository, thought to be the oldest structure here at early eighteenth century, with an octagonal revolving bookcase inside, and the bell tower of 1761, dated from ink writing found above its ceiling. All five were registered on the same day in 2018, bringing Bungotakada's total of registered structures to twenty-three.

Getting here takes a little planning. Bungotakada lost its railway line in 1965, so the nearest station is Usa on the JR Nippo Main Line. Daiko Hokubu buses bound for Bungotakada, Imi or Oita Airport leave from the stop to the left of the station exit and reach Bungotakada Bus Terminal in about ten minutes for 250 yen, running one or two times an hour between 7am and 5pm. From Oita Airport, the Northliner limousine bus runs to the same terminal in about fifty minutes without a change. The temple is roughly five minutes east of the terminal on foot, at the edge of the Showa no Machi shopping district.

One practical point: Myojuji is a working parish temple, not a ticketed monument. There is no admission fee, no set opening hours, and no visitor desk. The gate stands in an open precinct and can be looked at and photographed from outside without arrangement, but anything beyond that, including entry to the main hall, should be cleared with the temple office in advance. The city's cultural properties office at the Matama branch building handles enquiries about the five registered structures.